Tag Archives: SMS Marketing

Festive Fundraising – SMS Campaigns for Christmas

Fundraising Ideas,

Get to grips with Festive Fundraising with instaGiv

Charities Campaigning with Christmas Keywords

All charities know that the festive season is a mixed bag.

On the one hand, people can be inspired at Christmas to support charities and make larger donations.

On the other hand, people are rarely as strapped for cash as they are during the Christmas season. Competition will also heat up as every charity will be launching marketing campaigns pushing for donations.

People will also be bombarded with ads and sales and offers and discounts over the next few weeks. That’s why it’s more important than ever to find a good way to get your message across.

That’s why SMS Marketing is perfect for Christmas campaigns.

Festive Fundraising – Short and Sweet

Although people are willing to spend a long time watching TV adverts about Paddington and a Burglar (1 minute, 35 seconds!) and a Monster under the Bed (2m 11 secs!), the goodwill and the attention span of people will fade as they start to see ads everywhere.

That’s why an SMS message is the perfect method to grab the attention of supporters. You’re taking just a few seconds of their time to ask them to read just 160 characters and consider donating.

Even the busiest person will find time to check out your message, whereas they may not read a longer email.

Festive Fundraising – A Chance To Have Fun

Festive Fundraising Campaigns are a chance to have some fun

A Christmas campaign is a good opportunity to have a bit of fun with SMS keywords. Things like DONATE and SUPPORT are fine for the rest of the year, but at Christmas you need to spice things up a bit.

Some of the examples from our clients include Sense Scotland encouraging people to text RUDOLF to donate, while the Northern Ireland Hospice uses SANTAPAWS.

Festive Fundraising – Cost-Effective

As a keyword costs just £25 a month, SMS Marketing can be a great way to make the December budget go a little further. SMS campaigns are much less time-consuming and expensive than other campaigns, meaning you can use them to drum up support and focus more resources on other campaigns.

 

instaGiv is one of the UK’s leading software providers for the charity sector.

Working with over 300 UK registered charities, we use a range of tools to help charities collect donations, run competitions and more so that they can gather support for their cause.

This usually involves SMS tools. You’d be amazed at all the things we can do using just a humble text message.

Britney gets the importance of Festive Fundraising

Why not get in touch to get your Festive Fundraising sorted?

SMS Marketing is Booming – The Latest Stats

SMS Marketing

Make SMS Marketing easier with instaGiv

The Growth of SMS Marketing

SMS messaging is the fastest growing marketing channel in the UK, with the potential to reach millions of people on a daily basis, according to a newly published report.

The State of SMS reveals some interesting stats on how marketing by text message is available to a huge audience and is seen as more reliable than marketing by email or social media.

Here’s just some of the facts and figures from the report.

  • 93% of the UK population now own a mobile phone
  • At the end of 2016, there were 79.14 million active mobile devices in the UK
  • Only 50% of organisations use SMS marketing, but this is expected to grow to 92% by 2018

SMS Marketing is growing all the time

The report also says that messaging is the most popular feature on mobile devices. 89% of users claim they use SMS, followed by browsing.

SMS Marketing is widely available as soon many people use SMS

SMS Marketing – Opting-In

The State of SMS also looked at the issue of opting-in to receiving marketing texts.

37.2 million users in the UK opted in to receive text messages from businesses in 2016. That’s 7 million more than Facebook’s Audience. This is expected to increase to 48.65 million by 2020 – making text messaging the fastest growing marketing channel in the UK.

The research also shows that recipients respond well to SMS Marketing. In 2017, 54% of opted in users would engage with an SMS from a business – with around 25% clicking on a web link and another 25% forwarding the text on.

All this is good news for the charity sector. Charities are expected to see a 34% increase in donors opting in to receive text messages by the end of 2020.

There are currently 6.2 million donors who have opted in to receive texts on fundraising initiatives, charity news or confirmation of donations. This figure is expected to rise to 8.4 million by 2020.

SMS Marketing – Make It Simple with instaGiv

With the huge marketing potential available from text messages, charities should act now to get a proper system for allowing recipients to opt-in to marketing.

This is vital due to the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming into force in May 2018. This will change the way businesses can handle personal data and the rules around opting-in to marketing.

All this is taken care of with instaGiv’s Consent Feature.

This gives charities a safety net with regards to using supporter details for future contact.

When charities enable the Consent Feature on their fundraising campaigns they are giving the supporter the option at the point of donation to either opt-in to be contacted again or to opt-out.

This means that anyone who donates has read clear opt in/out details on the advertising material when they received their SMS keyword and shortcode.

For example, a person could receive a text asking for a donation like:

Text GIVE to 12345 to donate £3. To donate and not receive any future calls/SMS from us. text GIVE NO

You can also learn more by getting in touch with us.

5 Advantages of SMS Marketing over Email Marketing

SMS Marketing,

Instagiv take a look at SMS Marketing compared to Email Marketing

SMS Marketing v Email Marketing

Email is usually the medium of choice for marketing. Most people find that they receive a couple of marketing emails on a daily basis and ignore quite a few of them.

SMS on the other hand remains a more intimate platform. It’s usually a quick message from a friend or family member, or a quick way to organise things. People generally have a look at every text message they get.

SMS marketing campaigns have increasingly become a quick and cost-effective marketing platform.

And when you look at how audiences respond to SMS marketing, you may be surprised to see how well it competes with email.

Let’s look at some of the main advantages of an SMS marketing campaign, compared to an email marketing campaign.

 

SMS Can Reach Many More People

Email can reach anyone with an internet connection. But of the 7.5bn people in the world, less than half –  around 3.7bn people (as of September 2017) have access to the internet.

Mobile phones are a very different story. It might seem like everyone has a mobile phone.

But that’s actually an underestimation. According to GSMA’s real-time tracker of active mobile devices there are 8.26bn (and counting) mobile devices in the world. That’s around 750m more devices than there are people!

Just think about it. People may have one or two mobile phones and generally use them every day.

It’s not uncommon on the other hand for people to have a couple of email addresses, some of which are rarely used. They might use just one regularly, meaning your marketing messages may be going to a dormant email address.

Higher Open Rates for SMS Marketing

Common sense can tell you that people are more likely to open an SMS than an email.

Opening your inbox and finding five or six marketing emails can make you unlikely to click any, especially if you have lots of other emails coming in for other reasons.

Email marketing can prove difficult when people receive so many emails

An SMS on the other hand, is so short that most people will take the time to read it.

Recent research showed that in the UK the average open rate for emails was just under 25%. Meanwhile estimates for SMS marketing in recent years state that as many as 98% of phone owners will open an SMS message, usually within a few minutes of receiving it.

Higher Click Through Rates for SMS

The data also shows a much higher click-through rate for SMS messages compared to emails.

The most recent research shows that email marketing tends to generate a click-through rate of around 4.2%, compared to 36% for SMS messages.

When you work that out, that means around one in every 25 people will click-through when they get an email, compared to one in three for an SMS.

SMS is clearly a much more effective way of driving potential customers towards your website.

Quality Over Quantity

As people’s email inboxes take in more and more messages for all angles, the chances of your email sitting there unnoticed is quite high.

This means that email marketers tend to send quite a lot of emails, hoping to eventually catch the attention of their target with one or two.

For SMS, you know the open rate and click-through rate is high so you just have to work on crafting one or two good messages. That’s simple too as you only have a small number of characters to fill.

You just put the most important information in your text and get right to the point straight away.

SMS Marketing campaigns often prove to be much cheaper than email marketing campaigns

SMS is Cheaper

SMS is a much cheaper medium, as you are sending out fewer campaigns. It should also be more cost-effective, as a high click-through rate should lead to some sales, meaning the SMS campaign should soon pay for itself.

They also take much less time to create, as you don’t need to worry as much about the design as in an email, or how it will appear on different devices etc.

 

instaGiv can help your charity create SMS marketing campaigns that really work. We work with more than 300 charities to help boost their fundraising with SMS.

To find out more, check out our Services page or Contact Us.